How can you let your customer (virtually) taste, touch and feel your brand?

If your brand is not in your target audience’s daily dose of social media – you do not exist.

Consumers are living through their screens and news feeds.

Marketers across the globe are waking up to the realization that traditional channels will no longer give their brands the relevance necessary to drive sales and stay top-of-mind.

Here an excellent example:

In January 2016, Coca Cola gave up their 7-year-old slogan “Open Happiness” and replaced it with Taste the Feeling.

To illustrate the “Taste the Feeling “message, Coca Cola set up a vending machine in Singapore that dispensed a free can of Coke to people who gave the machine a hug:

The New Marketing “Funnel”

The bottom of the marketing funnel, where experience and advocacy meet – that’s where, in 2016, brands live. That’s where marketing budgets are being placed. It’s the flip of your business that social media has created.

Marketers must begin by asking themselves these difficult questions:

Why does my brand exist?

What is my brand’s purpose?

Which audience needs are we trying to meet?

That will inform what kinds of experiences will resonate with your core audience.

Experiential + Social Media = Connection

In today’s marketing landscape you must give your audience a reason to believe in your brand.

You must give them a reason to advocate, to share with their network what is special about your brand.

The best channel to accomplish relevancy is the oldest: experiential marketing.

Combine that with the newest channel: social media, and you have a relevant way to connect with your audience and market your brand.

Your Audience Co-Owns Your Brand

As such, they’re the most effective and credible marketer of your brand. Give your audience a reason and make it easy for them to do the marketing for you.

So, how can you leverage experimental marketing for your own business?

By creating experiences that:

Touch the senses

Are easy to share

Reward the right behavior

(And most importantly) Are relevant to their emotional desires

Experimental marketing is not just for B2C. While this approach is more difficult to apply to B2B marketing, this event will provide best practices that demonstrate how it can work.

To find out more about how you can give your customers a good reason to believe in your product or service by using digital and experimental marketing, Rodrigo Espinosa and I invite you to attend this webinar, hosted by Salesforce’s Data.com: